Essay :: Querying Eco-logics

Read and share this collectively written essay that queries ecology along with the Technoscience Salon.
"Querying Eco-logics: A collective experiment in affective ecologies and the politics of form and function" by Astrid Schrader, Roberta Buiani, Jessica Caporusso, Lisa Cockburn, Peter Hobbs, Kelly Ladd, Darren Patrick

Read and share this collectively written essay that queries ecology along with the Technoscience Salon.

Querying Eco-logics: A collective experiment in affective ecologies and the politics of form and function

The Space of the Technoscience Salon

The term ‘ecology’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as an ‘economy of nature’ in comparison with and contradistinction to human economies; ecology implies a science of counting and accounting. The scientific discourse is about countable nature, that is, an entity composed of measurable bits that naturally strive toward a specific direction in order to maintain a balance. Historically, the ‘economy of nature’ has been used interchangeably with the notion of ‘balance of nature’, suggesting that without human interference nature is self-regulating and teleological, striving to maintain itself.[1] Without such a goal, the science of ecology seems to be unable to ‘function’ — no models, no predictions, or even statements about how species might relate seem possible. This collectively authored essay queries ‘ecology’ alongside a yearlong project undertaken at the Toronto Technoscience Salon.

The Technoscience Salon — jointly organized by Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto) and Natasha Myers (York University) — is an open forum that poses conceptual and political questions about technoscience under varying themes. In 2012-2013 the Salon met for its fifth consecutive year and was accompanied by a graduate student reading and writing collective, organized by postdoctoral fellow, Astrid Schrader (York University, co-organizer of the Salon this year). Our theme this year was ‘ecologies’ and our collective goal was to explore the many contours, incarnations, and limitations of the concept of ‘ecology’.

Following the Salon organizers’ ‘opening provocation’,[2] we seek to query ecology’s inheritances as a functionalist systems science and to provoke alternative articulations. Can we envision ecology without function or without a functional teleology? What would this mean for the kind of relations implied by the notion of ecologies? Interrogating function requires a reflection on form, modes of attention, and kinds of performances. Moving beyond mere conceptual inquiries, our reflections take seriously modes of presentation, methodologies, and the spaces in which ‘objects’ are enacted.

Monthly Salon events gathered interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and artists, who were prompted by the organizers to report on their current research and to problematize the concept of ecology in relation to it. In addition to asking ‘What counts as ecology, and for whom?’, the Technoscience Salon sought to challenge conventional forms of academic knowledge exchanges. Organized around six subthemes, ‘Re-making Ecologies’, ‘Endangerments and Apocalypse’, ‘Queer(y)ing Ecologies’, ‘Magical Ecologies’, ‘Auditing Ecologies’, and ‘Affective Ecologies’, the speakers in each session offered a rich sense of ecological relations and their limitation and disruption, laying bare the deeper sensibilities needed in order to unpack knowledge practices and interventions that involve humans and more-than-human others. At the same time, they drew attention to the gaps that manifest between messy practices of science and the imperatives to provide viable explanations, clear results, and comprehensible theories.

The informal presentations were usually followed by two respondents before a broader discussion was opened up. A group of interdisciplinary graduate students and postdocs, whose work relates to the theme of ecology, attended (almost) all the events throughout the year and met regularly after the events. The authors of this paper formed the core of this group, which we call the Eco-logics Collective. In small group discussions, during which a designated rapporteur reported on the highlights of the events, we reflected on a specific Salon event in relation to other events and tried to push conceptual inquiries further. In this collaborative paper, we report on the major themes that emerged throughout the events and our follow-up discussions. We believe that our reflection on the politics and multiple meanings of form, witnessing and auditing cultures, affect, and time will contribute to a larger discussion on ecologies and interdisciplinarity. Under these headings, we are particularly concerned with engagements that emphasize the importance of spatial arrangements, performativity, and experimentation with formats as a means of developing ecologies of practice. We use the term ecologies in its plural form in order to credit its interdisciplinary nature and to show its ability to call attention to the coagulation of complex, often ephemeral, relations.

Our first Technoscience Salon meeting: we sit around a city park campfire on logs and camping chairs. As dusk fades to dark, the fire illuminates our faces as we share food and tell stories and anecdotes about what ecology has meant to us. We are a large group and the acoustics are bad. Although we can barely hear each other, we somehow feel connected. At our next gathering, we sit in a conference room, at tables assembled in a v-shape, thus leaving a widening gap in the middle, like an arrow departing from the speaker and converging in the direction of the audience. The room is fluorescently lit, its space conspicuously uninspiring. The fire has disappeared. While the organizers provide ample ‘space’ for informal discussion, the institutional setting has left its mark on the kind of stories that can be shared. We snack together on whatever makes its way to the potluck table. A loud announcement marks the formal beginning of the gathering. The chair of the Salon discussions, Michelle Murphy, encourages the presenters to use the middle of the room, the space in between the tables. A few of them reluctantly use the space. This does not seem possible without a comment on the boldness of the move: ‘There Michelle, I used the middle!’ We laugh and the atmosphere instantly changes. The invitation to ‘use the middle’ becomes something of a signature of the Salon. Our experience of relocation from the warm and friendly campfire to a cold and sterile conference room makes us self-conscious about the extent to which space determines our experiences and behaviours.

Like our movement from outside to inside, Jennifer Willet’s BioARTCAMP[3] demonstrates the transformative power of spatial relocation. For her performative experiment, Willet moved the aseptic environment of the scientific lab (microbes included) to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. In turn, this spatial shift affected the types of experiments and the interactions that occurred in that space. By moving the tools, media, and the test organisms and building a DIY (do-it-yourself) lab in the park, the invisible processes of laboratory science were rendered visible and their power was undermined; in addition the park setting lost its presumed naturalism. The scientific instrumentalization of living systems became visible. Organisms native to the park — fungi, lichens, and microscopic organisms — that are usually isolated in the institutional space of the lab seemed to lose their strangeness when they were analyzed in the very contexts they inhabit, while the strangeness of the very act of isolation that removes a life form out of its ecology was pronounced. Estrangement also worked the other way around as innocuous laboratory specimens were released back in the wilderness.[4] The BioARTCAMP simultaneously crosses the boundaries between art and science and nature and technology. Like Willet’s project, our collective experiment is an attempt to performatively reconfigure the ecologies that we inhabit.

Ecologies of Practices at Play: The Politics of Form and Function

The very format of the Technoscience Salon — both in terms of its conceptualization and its physical configuration — motivated us to interrogate further how the format of a presentation relates to the formation of the objects presented. The Salon discussions prompt us to not only query the connections between our ‘academic objects’ and their substantiation, but also the relations between ‘life forms’ (ordinarily called ‘organisms’) and ‘forms of life’ (the cultural forms they take). Following Stefan Helmreich, we suggest that ‘life forms’ and ‘forms of life’ are inseparably entangled.[5] While probing, prodding, playing, and experimenting with concepts, the Salon speakers made particularly evident that the forms that our academic objects take are deeply entangled with how they are enacted. We ask how these entanglements are directed and how they become overruled and transformed.

Natasha Myers, one of the speakers, asks us to consider biological relationships outside of functional economies. Myers is wary of the seemingly magical ‘just so’ stories, conventional evolutionary stories that presuppose a purpose of life and a function behind any kind of engagement between species. Instead of a functionalist economy that dominates evolutionary ecologies, she proposes an ecological thinking that allows for an attunement to the ways in which life forms are affectively entangled. In this way, Myers relates presuppositions about function to specific modes of engagement. Affect becomes a ‘form’ that reshapes functional teleologies. What if we were to take Myers’ affective reorientation of our thinking about life forms and bring it to bear on our academic forms of life? What does it mean to think the form of practice otherwise? An ‘affective ecology’ would then allow us to rethink both the relations between life forms and forms of life and their relations to and within an ‘ecology of practice’. Traditional discourses and academic/scientific language and methods appear to be inadequate to express the intricacies of the entanglement between life forms and forms of life.

One way to examine the relationship between form and function in academic scholarship is to interrogate the politics of substantiating accounts. As we attended each session of the Salon, we listened to, evaluated, and ascribed meaning to the stories told to us. In turn, we transcribed these events into field notes in an attempt to ‘freeze’ these experiences temporally and spatially into a written manuscript — a process we call the ‘documentary moment’. This practice stands as a reminder that what we observe and what we record are not causal relations of direct perception. Instead, ‘bearing witness to’ and accounting for each Salon presentation must be understood as a profoundly material process. Our aim is to adopt an ecological mode of attention, contending that perception is a multisensory and embodied enactment that does not privilege the parsing of the experiential into discrete sensations (e.g. the sense of vision, of touch, and so on). This position challenges tendencies in academic scholarship of relegating the act of witnessing to the realm of the visual,[6] and draws attention to importance of mediated listening in creating knowledge.[7] We do not simply see the production of knowledge as it unfolds before our eyes; rather we produce it when we listen to lectures, articulate discourses, and offer testimony — audible enactments that contour specific forms of academic life.

No matter how hard one tries to disentangle form and function in academia, sedimented modes of being more often than not reassert themselves. How can we give our thinking new forms of life, new life to our thinking? The scientist or ethnographer (whomever she may be) seems to have only two options: she can either re-create the conditions that have caused an event, eliminating all those elements deemed superfluous — those elements that are not needed for its re-creation — a practice which Isabelle Stengers compares to gardening — or she can apply a holistic method that takes into account all the factors participating in the making of the event — an ecology of practices.[8] Taking into account all the factors participating in the making of an event (the knowledge and the discourses, the material conditions, the phenomena and the objects engendered, and the ‘self’ of the researcher) is at the basis of Stengers’ cosmopolitics. Stengers also insists that ‘ecology is not a science of functions’ but is more akin to ‘bricolage’, as the various individuals that comprise entanglements are never solely defined based on where or how they might fit.[9] Thus, the scientist/ethnographer/gardener is always in the process of ‘making do’ through trial and error and improvisation. She, in effect, plugs into the multiplicity of ecologies so that the forms of her work become experimental, rather than reinforcing consensus. Stengers champions ‘an ecology of practices’ in which practitioners of science and the social sciences are encouraged to develop methods that challenge the stratification and stasis of grand theories by acknowledging our ‘attachments’ to a multitude of forces and affects.[10] What are the practices of making intellectual life forms? Or, as Tim Choy[11] asked in his presentation: ‘What kinds of forms are adequate to the problems that you want to present?’

Choy’s invitation to consider the relationship between our academic forms and their desired effect/affect introduces an important conceptual coupling between form and function. A striking example of thinking academic forms otherwise was provided by Martina Schlünder’s ‘Sheepish Ecologies’.[12] Her talk took the form of an affective performance — a becoming sheep — that exceeded our ability to capture it in the traditional academic form of note taking. Schlünder introduces us to flock and laboratory life forms: different ways of handling sheep make different kinds of sheep in different contexts. In her talk, Schlünder combined images and text that bore no apparent or direct relation with each other, narrating in the first person her experience researching the lives of mountain sheep, as they were cared for, as they were selected to become food or to produce wool, and as they were subjected to laboratory and scientific inquiry.

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Schlünder’s examples departed from traditional models that assume life forms are self-contained and demonstrated how ‘organisms’ are profoundly connected with any other life forms and forms of life. However, this relationality is not only proverbially difficult to convey, it is also often unwelcome, as Western academic paradigms of knowledge tend to conform to stable categories. As we listened to Schlünder’s talk we were unable to take detailed notes, not only because the performative aspects of the talk could not be properly reproduced in written form, but also because our academic training only partially prepared us to absorb the peculiar intricacy and performativity of her talk. In many ways, she presented sheepishness using recognizable academic forms, images, and speech. However, the images did not support her talk in the traditional academic mode. Instead, the images were on a continuous loop, performing sheepishness. In so doing, Schlünder disrupted normative modes of bearing witness to/providing an account for sheep. These forms exceed testimony and resist classification to form something much more lively and unsettled. The sheep, in effect/affect, eluded capture.

Most speakers in the Salon played with different methods to capture the nuances and the volatility of their subjects. For instance, in Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong, Tim Choy attempts to ‘substantiate’ or ‘materialize’[13] the politics that saturate the air we breathe. Choy chooses a purposely meandering strategy that pieces together anecdotes, newspaper headlines, and animals to construct what he refers to as ‘an anthropology of air’.[14] Focusing on Hong Kong, Choy shows how the simple act of breathing is always already political and enmeshed in uneven relations of power and privilege. ‘How are Hong Kong’s air spaces distributed?’ asks Choy. ‘Who gets to occupy those with the cleanest air? Who breathes the street? Who breathes mountains? Who breathes the sea? Who breathes flies?’.[15] In Choy’s work, the performative nature of his anecdotes stands out. His storytelling is an effective way of making the invisibility of toxicity visible. It is not simply a matter of telling stories of toxic poisoning or the tragedies of pollution. Instead, Choy crafts nuanced anecdotes that reveal the subtleties of living with toxins. Rather than laying blame solely at the feet of corporations or consumer culture and engaging in a narrative of ‘us against them’ (a standard narrative in environmental justice texts), his anecdotes trace the slowly moving political ethos that ties citizens in Hong Kong and elsewhere to the production of toxins to reveal how we all are imbricated or woven into a toxic will to power.

In the Salon, Choy performed these meanderings by refusing to present his work on ecologies of air in the traditional manner; rather than a presentation he offered a musing that could be shared, inviting all of us to reconsider our own methodologies and the political work that they do. His own reflections on methodology are guided by the desire to capture the elements of ecologies on a single page. ‘Don’t you know how it is when you want to say everything at once, right at the beginning?’ Choy works with comics now, a form that fuses the visual and the textual, the message and the form, the humorous and the serious. Choy, standing in the middle of the room, reminds us of how attached we are to recognized academic forms and, in so doing, underscores the limitations of the academic publication.

In this context, we are reminded of Choy’s statement that an attunement to form allows one to hear the ‘air whistling through the hollows of theory’.[16] For Choy, such a mode of attention requires making permeable the boundary between unruly matter and ‘putatively prior conceptual forms’.[17] That is, making porous the boundary between the vitality of life and a lifeless sharp-edged rationalism. In many ways, this is the kind of work we saw in much of the Salon’s discussion of ecology.

For example, Sarah Wylie’s work in and against institutionally sanctioned rationality enacts the porousness of this boundary. The collective-public platform that Wylie helped establish, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS), has initiated public science projects that relocate scientific instruments and methods (such as GIS and other monitoring tools) from the lab and the academic institution into the local community. It empowers the community by letting the public fabricate their own DIY instrument, based on blueprints and kits supplied by PLOTS, and uses them to acquire knowledge about the territory in which they live by monitoring such things as air quality and the landmass dedicated to industry. In turn, this newly acquired specific and unique knowledge improves scientific knowledge with the collection and dissemination of data regarding those under-researched territories that institutional science is normally not able to reach. Of particular interest are the ways in which this knowledge is disseminated and archived in order to create what Wylie defines as ‘recursive publics’. In order to make the community aware of, and work continually at refining the structures that bring them together, PLOTS opened both their research in public mapping and their web archive to the community, enabling them to contest official maps, reinvent maps, build maps that science does not recognize, and create an archive of resources that can be constantly changed, updated and re-combined.[18]

Holding to Account: Forms of Witnessing and Auditing

Another angle from which to approach the politics of form is to call attention to modes of documentation and forms of witnessing. In ‘Auditing Ecologies,’ speakers Kregg Hetherington[19] and Carlota McAllister[20] addressed auditing as an act that Donna Haraway would call ‘modest witnessing,’[21] alluding to the ways in which academic research is often presented as an apolitical objective knowledge making practice marked by distance and indifference.[22] Hence, our own documentation of the Salon in the form of written notes, audio recordings, and this article itself calls attention to the institutionalized forms of knowledge sharing in academia alongside our own return to modest witnessing in the construction of certain forms of knowledge. To examine which accounts are official stories (or become officiated) is to call into question that which is being represented and who should be held accountable to these representations. Critical to this concern is an understanding that documentary accounts are always politicized — simultaneously fact and fiction, story and testimony. They converge at the interstices of recording and remembrance. What, exactly, is audition? As a noun and verb fused together, ‘audit’ refers to inspection or examination, a review or an accounting for. A ‘form of audition’ implies listening or qualification through listening. Tellingly, the act of listening, that is, the interplay between call and response, as opposed to hearing, which can be seen as a more passive form of knowledge gathering.[23] This point spanned our session on Audit Cultures the Salon itself.

Given the political implications of this sort of knowledge production, we ask: how does the audit itself make the epistemological leap of turning experience into fact? We contend that paying close attention to the work auditing does necessitates paying attention to its form as well. This requires an interrogation of auditing as a technical practice of verification and credibility that operates alongside the construction of truths and fact-making produced by witnesses. Through the seemingly benign management of documentable facts, statistics, and testimonies,[24] auditing solders not only words into material form, but also people and things mise en place. The power of the documentary moment lies in its potentiality to render the unintelligible intelligible; it provides a manageable framework in which scholars can not only render visible, but also traceable, events that otherwise resist capture. In so doing, auditing attempts to render events as calculable.[25] That is, people and things are made quantifiable and knowable and, therefore, controllable.

How then can critical examinations into ecologies as a concept help us to elude the stickiness of the documentary moment as a fixating and controllable force? Instead of focusing on the limits of what is accounted for in the archive of our thoughts, Hetherington and McAllister propose that we cultivate an attention to things that are often overlooked, that which cannot be easily tracked or traced, thereby crafting an ‘imperceptible politics’[26] aimed at acclimatizing bodies that are not attuned to subtle differences such as seeing and being heard or being rendered visible or factual by a qualifying subject via testimony or documentation. They do so by drawing attention to moments of hesitation and resistance that disrupt the audit, as when those testifying withhold their stories by feigning ignorance — what Hetherington has called a strategic ‘disqualification’ — or when interlocutors deliberately turn the lens of inquiry away from themselves and on to their interrogators.[27]

A withholding engenders a different sort of engagement between auditor and audited. Not only does the refusal to share testimony substantiate the presence of things left unsaid — those ephemeral relations left beyond the margins of the page that defy fixation on paper and ink — but it also illuminates the unevenness of audition as a politics and as practice. From Hetherington’s and McAllister’s interventions, we learn that social inequalities are manufactured into the landscapes in which they work and that certain forms of technical practice are privileged, contouring how ecological relations are constructed in the process.

The documentary moment is utilized as a device to make things knowable through the convention of a single story. The task of the auditor is to render the narrative account of a given event comprehensibly, even if it requires the flattening of the time and space of particular experiences into a singular grid of intelligibility. However, the task of reproducing ‘the singularity of the story in which it was produced’ is a particular challenge.[28] To do this, one does not need to reject completely the rules and conventions that dominate a practice. The goal here is to transform and rework these rules, without necessarily setting them aside completely. How is this shift happening if not by invoking politics? How to preserve an idea of ecologies that blend objects, subjects, and politics without recurring necessarily to the overdetermining notion of agency?

Attempts to fix events on paper or in a recording illuminate the limitations of documentation as a practice. Like cadastral maps, censuses, and other bureaucratic tools used to enumerate and account for people, places, and things, recording personal testimony into written accounts crosscuts time and space, splicing events into a single comprehensible narrative. Here, the act of documentation serves as an impoverished device that seems to foreclose all potentiality. Yet, as we discuss below in the context Rich Doyle’s account of the very impossibility to give an account of drug-induced transformative experiences, these acts may also guide practices that seek to undo the very limitation of documentation. That is what we are trying to do with this document. As McAllister contends, testimony is not the capture of knowable facts. Rather, it operates as contingent performance. It is not only dependent on what information is shared, by whom, and what can be heard by others, but it is also defined by what is withheld and why. Paying attention to auditing helps us evaluate our complicity in reproducing the hegemony of academic writing over other forms of knowledge production.

A reorientation of sensibilities through an ecological, collective, and multidirectional mode of attention is one way to resist documentary fixation. Our emphasis on thinking collectively and ecologically seeks to challenge the notion that seeing or writing is a direct outcome of perception. By attending to imperceptible politics of what is said and what is left unspoken, we can start to move away from simply questioning what sorts of testimonies are to be recorded or how much agency is afforded the act of witnessing, instead formulating more relational sorts of questions, such as: What escapes the possibility of being audited? What cannot be audited? What gets messed up in these sorts of relations?

Trickster Ecologies: Fire, Time, Grace, Love

Many of our presenters disrupted the progressive temporality associated with a functional economy of nature by challenging the opposition between reproductive futurism and immanent presence. For example, Rich Doyle and Dorion Sagan offer technologies of self-undoings and remaking, that affirm our interconnectedness with the rest of nature and which trouble the narrative ‘I’. The ‘I’ or ego, for Doyle, is a lifeless form of rationalism that needs to be reconnected with the organic body and the rest of nature in order for the body to dwell in the present. This reconnection takes the form of ‘ego death’ and can be thought as a kind of rational-mysticism or magical-rationalism. Both Doyle and Sagan adopt a holistic approach that collapses the distinction between immanence — characterized by the co-implication of matter and mind, the vitality of becoming, and a continuous flux of relational forms of life — and a transcendence that posits holistic/spiritual experiences beyond and outside mundane practices. The accompanied imagined temporality of life is continuous and progressive, implying a progressive differentiation, interconnection and complexification of life. But there are also ruptures in the apparently continuous narrative against narrative. What brings us back to earth in Doyle’s account of drug induced transcendence of the mortal self is the impossibility to articulate the experience of an altered consciousness or self on drugs. There nevertheless exist plenty of written and oral accounts of the consciousness-altering experiences that necessarily guide future experimentations. Experiences thus become articulated in spite of the affirmation of this very impossibility. Ruptures through the materiality of language allow for partial connections, disrupting the phallocentric desire for an all encompassing holism articulated as eco-death.

In her presentation, Cate Sandilands performed a different kind of alliance generating rupture of temporal homogeneity and teleology. Echoing Donna Haraway, Sandilands offered ‘fire’ as a ‘queer critter’ and ‘an unruly trickster’, which intervenes in heteronormative assumptions intrinsic to a futurist ecological desire to save the environment for ‘our children’. Fire destroys and renews. Sandilands presented Jane Rule’s novel After the Fire, which features the intimate relations that five women form after they suffer a series of dramatic events.[29] Using this novel as a springboard, Sandilands poses fire not as destructive or apocalyptic force, but also as source of biodiversity and as a queer alternative to reproduction as the only means for generativity. Fire uncouples ‘the present from the future anterior’, a future that can only be perceived as a consequence of the present, challenging the ‘repro-normative time and space’ of reproductive futurism.[30] To present fire as a queer critter is to underscore the combined material-semiotic forces of fire and its capacity to queer heteronormative kinship relations, that is, to undo and redo ‘conventional’ progressive, future-oriented temporalities. Fire physically deterritorializes the forest and the lives of people, plants and animals, while at the same time it creates niches, — marginal worlds or ‘ecotones’ — that allow for species like jack-pines and Kirkland warbles to emerge.

In Rule’s novel, it is not a coincidence that ‘after the fire’ a queer community emerges that ‘nurtures unthought forms of possibility’, as a house burns down not only a ‘father’ but also a series of heteropatriachal bonds die with the fire.[31] The creative-destructive capacity of fire suggests alternative notions of kinship, replacing heteronormative relations with queer and multispecies affiliations. Proper names no longer mark genealogies, but allow for kinships across species. Three characters, called Red, Blackie, and Blue, have names that do not reveal who would be the child, the dog, or the mother.

Fire is not merely a ‘metaphor’ of radical renewal; when it whips through a forest or a home, fire is not just acting like radical renewal, fire is radical renewal in both a material-spatial and temporal sense. Instead of advocating a politics without a future, as an inherently unpredictable and transformative event, fire allows for a different relation between present and future. By insisting on the material-semiotic forces of fire that deterritorialize spatial and temporal relations simultaneously, Sandilands marks the forest and the natural world as a performative space in which the conventions of life are routinely unseated. As both Sandilands and Rule insist, fire is a queer bird. It is no coincidence that faggots are a bundle of kindling tied together and set on fire to burn witches and heretics. Witches, fire, and faggots have been bound together as unruly technologies.

Grace can also be considered an unruly technology that disrupts temporal homogeneity and progressive futurity in testimonial accounts of environmental destruction and the violent displacements of people. McAllister offered the notion of grace as a moment of hesitation and deferral in anthropological witnessing. For McAllister, acts of grace establish sociality; they instantiate the social. Like Sara Ahmed’s notion of affect,[32] grace binds together; it is a sort of social glue situated in-between relationships. In this context, grace is not a divine virtue, but a mode of sociality. Moments of grace engender not only a response but also a withholding that disrupts the traceability in ‘auditing ecologies’. As something unspeakable falls in-between verifiable accounts, an indeterminate ‘secret’ simultaneously retains and demonstrates the violence entailed in testimony. Withholding breaks the spell between the present and the future anterior; it disrupts the illusion of continuity between call and response, refusing to acknowledge hailing as an inevitable outcome. By suspending response, there is no way to move forward simply. The denial of participation exposes the teleology of auditing as an inadequate device for capturing that which resists temporal fixation. In McAllister’s account, moments of grace disrupt exchange and reciprocity. Grace is the affective expression of that which simultaneously binds us and disrupts the circulation of affect in economic terms. Grace, like fire, and the articulation of inarticulable experiences in Doyle’s account, simultaneously connects and disconnects. Together, they are metaphors, methodologies, and practices that disrupt the functionalist and temporal economy of a balance of nature by offering moments of intensity that allow for new connections and alliances across times and spaces.

The concept of grace can also help articulate the ways in which love and affect operate in ecology. Discussing ‘the place of grace in anthropology’, Julian Pitt-Rivers contrasts grace with the principle of law as a parallel code of conduct to the ‘affective side of life’.[33] For Pitt-Rivers, ‘grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts,” what is obligatory or predictable’.[34] It cannot be counted or traced, it exists beyond the law, rational form, and sovereignty. Similarly, for Lauren Berlant, ‘love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional’.[35] The paths that love draws us into unfold as ‘stories’ that disrupt functional teleological time. Thus, love may provide an answer to the question Astrid Schrader posed at the end of her presentation on affective ecologies: how do we think about motivation without teleology? The collaborative duo Mogu Mogu (Tim Choy and Shiho Satsuka) of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group quote Minoru Hamada to affirm that ‘love is the whole process of movement stimulated to move toward a certain direction. Love is positive or negative action, that is, approach or estrangement. Once the movement is over, love is over’.[36]In this way, love provides directionality without teleology, a direction that ceases to exist once the attachments that form the necessary glue in an affective ecology break. For Choy and Satsuka, ecological pathways or relations are only momentarily traceable, only as long as there are affective investments, or in this case love for the matsutake mushroom. These affective relations ‘do not work only serially — they work in parallel or radially, refusing a single direction, cause, or logic’; they require a ‘different kind of calculus of nature, love, and value’ that disrupt serial lines of connections.[37]

In a similar vein, Matt Stata,[38] another speaker in our Salon, alluded to a different ecological calculus; he spoke of how saving seeds is beneficial not because it necessarily saves money but for a ‘psychological benefit’ that is not simply about feeling the benefits of ‘closing of an ecological loop’, but due to a deep respect for other forms of life. The notion of deploying love as a tactic or technology was also invoked in Jennifer Willet’s discussion of bioethics during the ‘re-making ecologies’ salon. Laughing, Willet declared, ‘I’m not a hippie! But…’. She went on to assert that caring for other species cannot be done well if we do not also care for each other in these settings. This kind of caring is intensely motivated but no longer directed at a specific purpose. It is a caring without intentionality that manifests beyond the rational, and at times beyond the capacity of words to make sense.

Multispecies Entanglements

So far, we have discussed forms of performance actively generated by humans and those that refigure the relationships between humans and nonhumans. In addition, our focus on experimentation has led us to stumble upon unexpected and surprising forms that left their history of generation more or less untraceable. In keeping with our openness to unexpected encounters, here we are particularly concerned with forms that substantiate alternative relationships among humans and nonhumans in scientific studies of transspecies encounters.

In her response to the ‘Affective Ecologies’ session, Shiho Satsuka emphasized the difficulties communicating with the nonhuman other. How might the notion of ‘affective ecologies’ open our senses to the many languages in which the world speaks to us? Again, it is no coincidence that in Doyle’s account, plants speak. This powerful suggestion of plant creativity, the implication that plants may be using us, is appealing. Here we might ask what it is that a non-human wants and how do its desire(s) challenge our understanding of sexuality?

Retelling the Darwinian story of the (forbidden) sexual encounters between Ophrys orchids and their bee pollinators, which affectively devoid of any apparent advantage to the bees, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers suggest an answer. For Hustak and Myers, ‘an affective ecology [is] shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental propositions’, rather than reproductive desire or mere survival.[39] They assert that many orchid species in the ‘Ophrys genus have the remarkable ability to lure pollinators in spite of the fact that they do not offer the insects a nectar “reward.’’’.[40] Continuing, they add that ‘Ophrys species can attract their pollinators selectively by exhaling volatile compounds that mimic the sex pheromones of their insect pollinators’.[41] Without a sense for play or pleasure in these interspecies hook ups, scientists refer to these evolutionary friendships without mutual benefits as ‘sexual deception’. In contrast, Hustak and Myers call for a mode of engagement that is attuned to the involutionary momentum of bee and orchid, the ‘affective push and pull among bodies’ that they observe in Darwin’s historical experiments.[42] Hustak and Myers recall in minute detail the pleasurable interspecies minglings of anatomical parts in orchid-bee interactions. Without the performative reading and writing practices of the authors — their own involutionary momentum — these ‘erotic acts’ remain difficult to grasp outside of the functionalist purview of sexual reproduction. That is, they will always remain a matter of deception. But don’t believe us, go ahead, read the paper and enjoy; as one of us just recalled: ‘it’s hot’. An affective engagement is not merely a tactic that would move us away from functionalist accounts, but an attunement; it cannot be applied, it must be practiced and evoked.

Extending the realm of ecological politics to include affective relations and nonhuman agents or actants was part of an ongoing debate in the Salon. For some of us, paying particular attention to affect offers a greater understanding of the complexities that inform, influence, and transform objects and practices. It was also argued that this amassing of affect and nonhuman forces threatens to displace politics, that paying attention to affect prevents us from addressing issues of global inequality and environmental (in)justice. In other words, affect is assumed to crowd out and downplay the role of politics. We can envision the floodgates opening and affect and everything that is not human rushes in to overwhelm our sense of political practice. One may counter that extending the ‘political’ to include nonhumans (which in addition to animals would also include plants, microbes, and inanimate material, such as toxins and micro chips) constitutes a different mode of attention in the making of scientific knowledge. While some Salon participants insisted that this reconfiguration of the political constitutes a necessary gambit that directly confronts our illusions of mastery, others were equally insistent that such claims could be construed as politically irresponsible. Attention to affect offers a ‘new’ kind of politics, not based on merely extending the political realm, but one that is based on new alliances engendered by affective modes of relating. Nevertheless, this raises concerns of what might be lost in this transformation. These types of exchanges were essential to the Salon’s productivity, and with this in mind, we have tried to duplicate this creative and unresolved debate in this collective text.

The projects presented at the Salon are informed by the awareness that current scientific paradigms end up reducing the relations established between the subject researching, the object researched, the contexts of research, and the rationales that lead research to univocal and dry facts detached from the realities that generated them. The speakers at the Salon articulated the difficulties of translating their findings into straightforward statements and definite results, as in Schlünder’s talk, or to limit research to conventional spaces and recipients, as in Wylie’s repurposing of scientific inquiry and Willet’s relocation of the scientific object. A significant shift occurs in those instances when science is displaced from its original locus, when objectives are withdrawn from their original purposes, or when we create spaces in which local communities who usually do not benefit from scientific research become empowered to improve their conditions through access to these technologies. Here affect plays a crucial role in modulating the way in which we interpret an event, eliciting new politics that effectively shift our relations with or understandings of such events.

Conclusion

Striving towards an ecology of practices was a prime motivator that led us from attending the Salon to the process of writing this collective text. The simple act of showing up on a regular basis, listening to speakers, asking questions, and engaging in conversation, debate, and gossip, proved to be a technology of belonging with life-changing effects. In feminist science studies, the meeting place is both a metaphor for political engagement and the very site in which lives are collectively changed, work-shopped, and imbricated. Two scholarly meetings spring to mind: Haraway asks us to acknowledge our meetings with species as a form of companionship that not only is necessary to our existence but also operates as an ethics of care and a technology of belonging.[43] Similarly, Karen Barad asks us to meet the universe halfway by acknowledging that the refracted and agential world around us unfolds as a constant meeting of matter and meaning.[44] Inspired by the shifting space of the Salon, by its encounters with sheep, orchids, fire, microbes, and zombies, and by the repeated calls to see and do things differently, we find ourselves pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we have become aware of the necessity to formulate novel and more creative methods to address the complicated processes unfolding through these spaces and these encounters. And on the other hand, we have grown increasingly self-conscious about the risks of drifting too far from academic legibility, namely: meeting at the appropriate venue, using the requisite technologies, quoting recognizable authorities, following a specific organization and a regular schedule. In this space of collective production and engagement we have not sought to reignite the fire around which we first gathered, but instead hope to have conveyed parts of the struggles and troubles that a multi-vocal, interdisciplinary, collective querying of eco-logics engendered. Few of us would dare to use term ‘ecology’ in the singular again or would assume that balance is a property of nature.

[2] In the opening provocation, the organizers invited presenters and participants to think through current ontological struggles over ecology: where ecology begins and ends; how ecology and economy are bound together in advanced captial; ecological temporalities; and, alternative ecological imaginaries. These can be found at <http://technosalon.wordpress.com/2008-9-salon/ecologies-opening-provocation-2/> [Accessed 31st July 2013]

[3] Jennifer Willet reported on her experience leading the BioARTCAMP, a hybrid workshop/conference/performance event where 20 national and international artists, scientists, filmmakers, and university students worked for two weeks to build a portable biology laboratory in the Banff National Park.

[19] Kregg Hetherington works on the politicization environmental knowledge in Paraguay. His talk on the theme of ‘Auditing Ecologies’ draws on his concerns regarding the politics of creating officiated knowledge through situated interventions between people and things.

[20] Carlota McAllister contributed to ‘Auditing Ecologies’, presenting her project on political mobilization against contemporary capitalism and ‘large-scale projects for both extraction and conservation in the ends-of-the-earth spaces’ in Chile.

[23] We distinguish between hearing and listening in order to underscore listening as a cultivated practice that requires an attention to the contingency of sensory development and knowledge formation. This mode of attention draws on the works of Charles Hirschkind (The Ethical Soundscape, 2006) and Walter Benjamin (Illuminations, 1969), who argue that listening is an actively engaged relationship between orator and audience as opposed to hearing which implies a disinterested or passive association.

[27] In her Salon presentation, McAllister demonstrated how her interlocutors quite literally and figuratively pulled her unwilling presence into frame. During her talk, McAllister screened a video recording that documented an outing with her interlocutors in Patagonia. In the clip, one participant teasingly calls out McAllister’s filming as intrusive as she films everyone present except herself. McAllister turns the video camera back onto herself, at once interrupting a violent mode of testimony and recording her presence in the process.

[43] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

[44] Karen Barad, Meeting the University Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Cameron Murray and Sonia Grant for their close reading and comments on an earlier version of this paper. Sonia was also a member of the eco-logics collective and contributed substantially to the discussion that let to this paper.